Align resources to strategyTo achieve your strategic objectives, the EPM Solution helps you identify, prioritize, and invest in projects and programs with Budget Tracking. It provides improved capabilities to allocate human resources and to manage projects and programs in line with strategic objectives. Then, by routinely evaluating and adjusting your portfolio of projects and alignment of resources, you can optimize your investment productivity.Enhance your business intelligenceThe EPM Solution helps you monitor performance, visualize trends, manage risks, and identify investment gaps. Use Reporting Data Services to share information through common business reporting tools such as Microsoft Office Excel and a variety of business scorecards. The pre-built cube that is part of the EPM Solution is extensible, and it provides a data link for building scorecards and dashboards to facilitate informed decisions about existing projects, tradeoffs, and new opportunities.Collaborate and coordinate easilyEnsuring teams share common goals and work together effectively becomes more vital as organizations become more geographically and culturally diverse. Both Web clients and familiar Microsoft Office applications enable access to timely, business-critical project information in the EPM Solution, so teams can share knowledge, collaborate smoothly to complete tasks and deliverables, and adjust activities quickly to accommodate project changes and updates.Manage resources effectivelyMany organizations struggle to deploy resources effectively, leading to higher costs and project delays. The EPM Solution helps you accurately assess needs to effectively deploy resources today and create future plans for your organization—so you have the right people on your high-priority projects for optimal delivery. You can track availability, utilization, and work progress through time sheets.Manage the entire project lifecyclePropose and initiate projects in the Web client. As these proposals gain approval or grow into more strategically important initiatives, you can "promote" them to projects on the centralized Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 for tracking of budgets and resources that might otherwise have been under the radar. Upon project completion, you can track remaining operations work as activity plans on the Web. You can get a comprehensive view of your organization's entire portfolio of work at all stages for better decision-making.Manage the simple and the complexFor simple work, you can use the project task list in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services technology or the activity plans in Microsoft Office Project Web Access. These can migrate to full projects. With programs, you can easily manage complex work that includes multiple sub-projects and their inter-dependencies in a coordinated fashion. You can also manage portfolios of projects and programs.Promote continuous improvementOrganizations are increasingly standardizing their processes to improve operational efficiencies and more effectively manage project complexity. The EPM Solution enables you to implement repeatable processes as templates, refine them based on your best practices, and capture these improved processes within a custom Project Guide. You can develop and apply automated workflows, resulting in lowered costs, faster cycle times, and increased quality.Hire strategicallyWithout understanding long-term workloads and capacity, companies can experience inefficient hire-fire cycles, resulting in higher overhead, lost knowledge, and poor employee morale. By providing visibility into overall work commitments and resource capabilities, the EPM Solution helps you create resource plans to align your strategic recruiting and outsourcing with your long-term business objectives. Get more from existing technology investmentsThe EPM Solution is built on Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft SQL Server, and Windows SharePoint Services technology, so you can get the most out of your organization's skills in these Microsoft technologies. The EPM Solution also includes pre-built integration with the Microsoft Office system, enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, and the Microsoft collaboration platform. The well defined Office Project Server application programming interface (API), Eventing Model, and other tools make this a flexible and extensible platform to manage your work.Drive real return on investmentBy enabling increased employee productivity, faster cycle times, reduced costs, and improved time management, the EPM Solution provides a positive and sustainable return on your investment. In IT portfolio management, software can cut costs 2-5 percent, improve productivity 25-20 percent, and shift 10-15 percent of budgets to more-strategic projects. In developing and bringing new products to market, the best performers - those who have applied rigorous process and technology to their research and development and go-to-market activities - can reduce time to market by more than 30 percent.